The dream of a collaboration between the various movie studios that control Marvel's superhero properties always felt completely out of reach... until Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures announced in 2015 that Spider-Man was coming to the MCU.

Tom Holland's Peter Parker – who made his debut in Captain America: Civil War in 2016 – now has a solo movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, on the horizon, and the film's producer (and former Sony chief) Amy Pascal has revealed how the partnership came about.

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"We made five Spider-Man movies. And we needed to do something different," Pascal told Slash Film.

"And we tried doing a lot of different things as you all know and documented. But the thing that we hadn't done was put him in the Marvel universe, and put him in a world where there are other superheroes. Because he was always the only superhero.

"And there's only so many times that you can tell the story of, 'I really want everyone to love me, and if I tell them I'm Spider-Man, they'll love me... but I can't tell them!' So, we've told that story as many ways as I could figure out."

Pascal said she knew Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige from when "he used to get coffee" for previous Spider-Man producer Avi Arad.

"So it felt like we needed to do something else and this felt like the right thing to do," she continued. "And Kevin and I had been talking for a very long time about that.

"And here's the thing that I wanted, I emphasise for all of you because I think this is really important and I don't think it will ever happen again in the history of the movie business – you have three studios [Sony, Marvel and Disney] that came together to have this movie being made. And no studio likes to share anything with anyone, let alone three studios.

"And truthfully – there is nothing cynical I can find in this statement – everybody did it because they wanted Spider-Man to be great. Truly, it was because Spider-Man is great, the character is great, and people love him. That's good for Disney. That's good for Marvel. And that is certainly good for Sony.

"So, the fact that all these companies were willing to work together to make that happen, believing that everybody needed each other in order to have that happen. I think that's pretty miraculous."